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The Media Circus Around Salman Khan Verdict

“Orlando sat so still that you
could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would
have been life of a kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window
and settled on her chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up
and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For
there would be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood,
there is life.- Virginia Woolf.

This paragraph picked out of wonderful masterpiece of Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando as she explains the predicament of Orlando, the man turned
woman, struggling to write a poem, a novel is something every writer faces. Ms.
Woolf mentions this as a challenge thrown at a novelist every waking day. But I
would presume, the challenge extends in even graver proportions to a new set of
writer, which is a journalist.

A modern day journalist needs not only blood, she needs a fresh
blood, a blood which is not many day old. She writes not as a response to her
need to write, but as a response to her need to be read. If she is a journalist
of new age media, she further has the responsibility of keeping people glued to
her TV channel. She will shout, hound, harangue against imaginary people who
are out to kill and exterminate humanity. Human mind is very adaptable. This
flexibility is what is great about human mind. This flexibility is his curse.
You put him in the mess and he starts believing it to be his home after a
while. He will no longer struggle to get out of it. Beneath the veneer of human
intellect, he is no better than Pavlovian frog in such matters. He begins
believing that journalism is entertainment. The lines thin and merge. On one
hand it kills real literature, it obfuscate the true purpose of journalism.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that a Journalist should
surrender the right to a position. But all this frothing out of the corner of
the mouth righteousness, irrespective of the position which the event takes,
one its own, unguided by the journalistic narrative. That is something which
does not quite qualifies for journalism. There has to be some sense of
proportion in the outrage, some space of silence in the noise. Just because you
hold the mike, doesn’t make you a lawyer, a patriot, a moralist, all rolled in
one. I may be one of these, with the most silent voice and you should come to
me and ask my opinion. If not, then this becomes what is often termed as media
circus.

An accident, an unfortunate event is just that. You report it
without jumping up on the table and become a studio socialist carrying forward
the case for the masses. A movie star runs over footpath dwellers. Thirteen
years hence we come around to some justice, or as we later realize, some semblance
of it, only a semblance, a pretense. The Gods of the people come around on
Television and announce it as a victory of justice. Something inside me shifts
in unease. Didn’t we read somewhere, Justice delayed is justice denied? But
then, justice is such an odd and outrageously out-of-reach of human mind kind
of idea. We dance in absurd happiness about the vindication of the idea of
equity of human beings as court, after wise deliberation of thirteen years
convicts the star with five year imprisonment for running over people sleeping
on the footpath. He is charged with culpable homicide. The story ends. The
studio programming goes for a toss. What do we talk about? The ticker had already
run about twenty-four hour non-stop coverage of Salman Khan Verdict. Verdict
came, story ends. Prosecution lawyer does not come on TV to talk about biryani.
Evidently he is not interested in becoming a celebrity beacon of justice in a country
where under-trials equal the population of Denmark.

Media is desperate. The man, the heartthrob, till yesterday
proclaimed by them as Controversy’s favorite child, has been convicted, and an
efficient battery of lawyers has obtained a quick bail and taken him home. The
drama has ended prematurely, tossing off their plans of 24 hours coverage, announced
prematurely, with a hope of an immediate jail terms, fans running rampage,
rolling on streets, tonsured heads- all such stupidity. No Jail, no drama, what
to do. Then, Bollywood comes in solidarity. There is a competition to prove
loyalty. Someone says, those sleeping on street are akin to dogs and like dogs
they died. A respite, a lifeline of stupidity, and the debate turns to the
supporters of Salman. The unsure idiots come to studios trying to justify.

“This accidents could not have happened, if people weren’t asleep
on the footpath and had government offered them with shelters” – say some.
True, in which case her friend could comfortably have driven on the pavement
without killing anyone. What man doesn’t want to drive on a pavement at one
time or other? What kind of people would come and sleep on those pavements and
prevent him from driving there? I am rich, I paid taxes to the government to
make those pavement, I would bloody-well drive over them. She doesn’t know what
she is talking about. The singer who compared the dead with the canine is even
more absurd. Music surely can take you close to the divine, it cannot cure
stupidity. It confounds everyone. So far so good, 5 more hours out of the
proclaimed goes in covering this. In the meantime, the story turns. Higher courts
grant bail to the superstar. The rich gets the machinery move at dizzying past.
The same fuel which made the machinery move so slow that it did not catch up
with one elusive witness for all of thirteen years, suddenly moves it so fast
that within no time that the star is back at home.

The narrative by this time has lost its pivot. It does not know
where to go.

Should we attack the star, his loyalists, the victims or the
government? It was an accident. It was nothing that the star wanted to
eliminate all the poor people from the face of the city like some politician
who visited him to express solidarity. There was no case of class struggle. It
was an act of accidental illegality, nothing more, and nothing less. What could
however be considered an act of class- discrimination is about how the case was
pursued by the legal system and how it was covered by the media. In the
meantime, from being a murderer of people, the media has to go back to the tag
of conspiracy’s favorite child. The act is barely as disgusting as is our
response as a society, as a nation, as media to the act of this innocent drunk
accident on one September night, 13 years back. Let us pause, mute the TV sets
and introspect. The act while turned out ghastly with death of innocent people,
is not the first act of drunk driving, nor will it be last. What about law
enforcement? How do you enforce law in a city, where the insult of local food
is prime concern of lawmakers and they can bring privilege motion to safeguard
the feelings of a sad Vada pao, and when a policeman asks license from a
lawmaker, he gets thrashed in public. Let us not go on pretending that Mumbai
is a cosmopolitan city and the fact it is not has nothing to do with migrants
who went in there to build a pretense of a global city.

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